Closer Look at 19" Monitor Features. Part IV.. Page 29

We continue the good tradition of testing 19-inch LCD monitors. Today we are going to introduce to you 15 models from Acer, ASUS, BenQ, EIZO, NEC, Philips, Samsung and Viewsonic. We will look at a few widescreen models and discuss the monitors’ response time and RTC errors for all RTC-enabled monitors. Read more in our detailed roundup now!

By default, the brightness setting is set at 100% and the contrast setting at 70%. 50% of brightness and 55% of contrast yield 100-nit brightness of white.

Color gradients are reproduced well on this monitor with artifacts barely visible at any brightness/contrast settings. On the other hand, some fuzziness, a sort of noise, can be seen in certain halftones. It is not easily visible, but it’s there. This is probably a defect of dithering (Frame Rate Control, to be exact) because the monitor uses an 18-bit matrix and produces 24-bit color through emulation.

The monitor reproduces the full range of color tones at its default settings, but the gamma value is obviously too low, making the image look pale and unsaturated.

The curves straighten up at the reduced brightness/contrast, but the monitor begins to lose some of the darkest tones: the gamma curves meet the X-axis in the bottom left of the diagram not exactly in the point (0.0), but on the left of it. At these settings (55% contrast) the monitor cannot reproduce about 15-17% of the color range (i.e. these tones are all displayed the same as pure black). This defect is going to aggravate on further reduction of contrast.

The VG920 features a rather accurate color temperature setup. The sRGB mode should be a little colder than 6500K, but that’s the only thing I can cavil at here.

So, my words about the VG920 lacking response time compensation are confirmed by the tests. The graph shows a typical old TN+Film matrix for which the declared response time has little to do with the real speed. The matrix’s speed is fluctuating around 35 milliseconds through nearly the entire range of transitions, but then drops suddenly on the black-to-white transition to enable the manufacturer to declare a low response in the specs. But few users will ever happen to experience this speed in practice. I want to remind you that white color means the maximum value the matrix (not the monitor!) can receive via its digital interface, not the signal the graphics card outputs! In other words, this pure white color can only be achieved if you’ve selected the highest possible contrast setting in the monitor’s menu. But real monitors are hardly ever used with this kind of setup, so you won’t be wrong to assume that the response time of this monitor is closer to 30 rather than to 8 milliseconds.

The contrast ratio is good. It is lower than Samsung monitors have, but above average nonetheless. The maximum brightness of 250 nits is quite high for a PC monitor, too. Note also that the measured brightness is quite close to the specified value.

Thus, the “monitor for games and processing complex graphics” positioning of the VG920 doesn’t seem to have a solid base. It is an ordinary inexpensive 19” model with a slow matrix, average setup quality and unimpressive design. This monitor will do well as an office model, but I wouldn’t recommend purchasing it as a gaming monitor. It is many times slower than the new models with response time compensation, which you should consider first.